28-year-old’s side hustle makes $180 an hour, more than doubling his earnings: How it ‘snowballed’ into a six-figure salary

Osborne spent roughly $50 to launch his side hustle, he says. His solely bills are QuickBooks, Squarespace and Zoom subscriptions — no advertising and marketing, since all his purchasers have been referrals, he notes.

But the job is demanding. From October by way of December, when most colleges set utility deadlines, Osborne works 70 hours per week between his two roles. “I usually say to my mates, ‘Hey, I’ll see you in January,'” he says.

Osborne’s purchasers vary broadly in backgrounds, ambitions, monetary standing and writing talent. As a end result, his workload and earnings are unpredictable. He works with college students for wherever from one to 25 hours every, and usually costs $180 per hour — however presents reductions for “households who genuinely want monetary assist,” he says.

The side hustle is time-consuming as a result of most colleges ask for a number of essays: a private assertion, a number of supplemental prompts and a sometimes-optional “Covid essay,” asking college students to explain the pandemic’s influence on their highschool experiences.

Applying to 10 colleges — an formidable however not unusual quantity — means writing upwards of 25 essays, Osborne says.

Writing an admissions essay will be existentially draining. You want to search out a matter so significant, and categorical your ideas on it so eloquently, that it can win over admissions counselors who’re deciding your future.

Osborne labored as a peer psychological well being counselor at Stanford University, and says he is outfitted to assist college students navigate that stress. In his first assembly with purchasers, he tries to make the vastness of the immediate much less daunting.

He asks questions — even so simple as “What do you love to do?” — and acts as a “sounding board” to assist the coed brainstorm concepts. He takes notes and audio recordings, so he and purchasers can reference them later.

In doing so, Osborne walks what he calls “the moral line”: He will not write something for a pupil, and typically confronts mother and father about their heavy-handed solutions. The idea of every essay is more necessary than its development, he provides.

Once, he labored with a pupil who spent each Sunday watching National Football League video games, crunching statistics and posting findings on a fantasy soccer Instagram account. At first, the teenager was hesitant to incorporate the interest in his faculty utility, Osborne says.

Osborne helped the coed unpack why he appreciated fantasy soccer, and the way it may probably translate into future research.

“The essay ended up being like, ‘Look on the abilities I’ve constructed by way of this,'” Osborne says. “Creative writing, statistical evaluation, graphic design, social media, advertising and marketing abilities. All these invaluable issues stemmed from one factor they beloved.”

That pupil received into his first-choice college, says Osborne.